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Could someone explain exactly what the problem is for those of us that missed it? Either my lurking is too occasional or I'm oblivious.

by streblo 17y ago

blasdel 17y ago
PG constantly fucks around with the voting process to do things other than the obvious time-decay voting system where fresh content and fresh votes get a temporary boost. Recently it's seemed like someone on the backend is manually demoting posts from the front page. That's better than the old policy of deleting them and sometimes hell-banning the poster, but it's still pretty anti-community. Something that's gone on for a long time is that you'll get your account disenfranchised -- the voting buttons all still show up, and your votes get registered (can't vote again), but the points don't get added: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1029776 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1029776
- j_baker 17y ago
  Dumb question. What exactly is the difference between a hell-banning and a normal banning?
  - mbrubeck 17y ago
    Hellbanned users don't know they are banned. They still see their own posts and comments, but no one else does.
    - WilliamLP 17y ago
      That explains the cold chill I sometimes feel down my neck when browsing this site.
  - blasdel 17y ago
    When you're hell-banned, you aren't notified of it, you can continue to post links and comments, but you're the only one that sees them normally -- they're deleted for everyone except logged-in users that have [showdead] turned on. It was pioneered by the goons at SomethingAwful for dealing with problem users in a particularly lulzy way. It is rather effective for drive-by trolls that would just create another account and amp things up if they knew. But even SomethingAwful, with the most deliberately lulz-stoking moderators on the web, uses other methods almost exclusively: probation, timeouts, and normal banning. news.arc is uniquely capricious in that hell-banning is the only method in use

Could someone explain exactly what the problem is for those of us that missed it? Either my lurking is too occasional or I'm oblivious.

by streblo 17y ago

Could someone explain exactly what the problem is for those of us that missed it? Either my lurking is too occasional or I'm oblivious.

blasdel 17y ago

PG constantly fucks around with the voting process to do things other than the obvious time-decay voting system where fresh content and fresh votes get a temporary boost. Recently it's seemed like someone on the backend is manually demoting posts from the front page. That's better than the old policy of deleting them and sometimes hell-banning the poster, but it's still pretty anti-community. Something that's gone on for a long time is that you'll get your account disenfranchised -- the voting buttons all still show up, and your votes get registered (can't vote again), but the points don't get added: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1029776 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1029776

j_baker 17y ago
Dumb question. What exactly is the difference between a hell-banning and a normal banning?
- mbrubeck 17y ago
  Hellbanned users don't know they are banned. They still see their own posts and comments, but no one else does.
  - WilliamLP 17y ago
    That explains the cold chill I sometimes feel down my neck when browsing this site.
- blasdel 17y ago
  When you're hell-banned, you aren't notified of it, you can continue to post links and comments, but you're the only one that sees them normally -- they're deleted for everyone except logged-in users that have [showdead] turned on. It was pioneered by the goons at SomethingAwful for dealing with problem users in a particularly lulzy way. It is rather effective for drive-by trolls that would just create another account and amp things up if they knew. But even SomethingAwful, with the most deliberately lulz-stoking moderators on the web, uses other methods almost exclusively: probation, timeouts, and normal banning. news.arc is uniquely capricious in that hell-banning is the only method in use